ArmedBear / J

Today's 0.16.2+ development snapshot is up:

    http://armedbear.org/j.zip          (source and documentation)
    http://armedbear.org/j-jar.zip      (just j.jar)

This snapshot introduces a real glow-in-the-dark, lift-the-flap
"drafts" folder.

For a long time, if you exited j while you were in the midst of
composing a mail message, the composition buffer would be restored as
part of the saved session when j started up again. This happened
automatically because there was an actual file backing the message, so
the buffer was restored just like any other file-backed buffer. J knew
the buffer should be a mail composition buffer because the file
backing it was in a special directory (~/.j/mail/unsent).

So postponed messages weren't a total disaster. But if you made the
mistake of closing the composition buffer after you saved it, there
was no obvious or documented way to re-open the saved message again
later so you could finish it and send it on its way.

Starting with the current snapshot, you can simply enter "drafts" in
the location bar, and you'll get a mailbox view of the long-hidden
drafts folder. (If you're looking at some other mailbox, you can also
get to the drafts folder by clicking on "drafts" under "Local Folders"
in the sidebar tree.)

At the moment, all you can really do in the drafts folder is hit
Enter to open the message on the current line. If you do that, you'll
get a mail composition buffer which will let you continue working on
the message in question and eventually send it.

For no good reason, j has never deleted any messages from the drafts
folder, even if you did subsequently manage to send them off, and the
current snapshot is no different in this respect, although the right
thing to do is clearly to delete the message after it has been sent,
and I'll be implementing that functionality shortly.

In fact, with the current snapshot, you can't even delete a message
from the drafts folder manually; I'll be implementing delete and
expunge for the drafts folder in the near future too.

Finally, the location of the drafts folder has changed; it's now
~/.j/mail/local/drafts, rather than ~/.j/mail/unsent. The current
snapshot runs a bit of code at startup to move your unsent messages to
the new place and remove the obsolete ~/.j/mail/unsent directory. This
code has worked fine for me on two different machines, but if you have
unsaved messages that are important to you, you might want to back up
~/.j/mail/unsent before running the new snapshot, just in case.

Thanks for your support.

-Peter